Review: Taco USA

An American Indian friend, after reading the syndicated “Ask A Mexican!” column for the first time, remarked: “That Mexican must have a tongue like a buffalo, to keep it pressed so firmly against his cheek.”

Humor — from sly to outrageous to ribald — is the salsa that Gustavo Arellano slathers across his combination platter of logic, outrage, statistics and history, all of which have made him a proud spokesman for both Mexican-immigrant and multi-generational Mexican-heritage Americans.

It’s a mixture that has made the weekly installment of “Ask A Mexican!” eagerly anticipated across America. It’s also what makes Arellano’s recent book, “Taco USA,” a lively study of the most obvious manifestation of this migration.

“Taco USA” is about how Mexican food became part of the American mainstream. Immigration reform, multicultural education and the potential for assimilation will certainly remain hot-button topics for the foreseeable future; what is equally certain is that we are likely to debate these topics over enchilada dinners.

Anglos travelling to the United States’ new southwestern territories in the mid-19th century wrote volumes about the fiery cuisine prepared under appallingly unsanitary conditions. Still, converts must have been made. Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show brought a “genuine Mexican Restaurant” to New York City in 1886 — it served mescal with chile rellenos and tamales for breakfast. By the turn of the century, sidewalk-vendor “hot tamale men” were fixtures in most urban landscapes across the land. In San Antonio, Anglos had adopted the border food now known as Tex-Mex as their own, while Californians had developed considerable enthusiasm for “Spanish” restaurants. An industry of ingredients and prepared foods — from German-Texans in New Braunfels selling Gebhardt’s chili powder to Mexicans in Anaheim canning chili peppers — fed the growing national enthusiasm for Mexican food. Canned chili and tamales became pantry staples. (As a measure of how desperate folks were, by the 1930s there were Texas oilfield workers in Arabia waiting eagerly for canned tortillas to complete a two-month transoceanic voyage.)

Beef fajitas at El Real in Houston. (Chronicle/Johnny Hanson)

By the end of World War II, millions of servicemen had passed through Fort Bliss near El Paso and the San Diego Naval Station, and their tastes in food had changed forever. Fortunes were made by visionaries, from creators of enchilada TV dinners to entrepreneur Glen Bell, who went from offering tacos as a sideline at his burger stand to building the Taco Bell empire. Arellano points out that Bell and numerous imitators brought “tay-cos” and “boo-ritas” to the hinterlands long before any Mexicans showed up to help with pronunciation and confirm what the real thing tasted like.

Defining the “real thing” in Mexican food is as lively a topic of debate as immigration reform. Arellano takes a broad view. American food with obvious Mexican roots is, at heart, Mexican food. In Chicago, the better hot-dog stands offer a tantalizing specialty: a hot dog bun filled with a pork tamale topped with chili.It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to Arellano why this bit of genius requires a trip to the Windy City to savor. Los Angeles for decades has had the pastrami-and-cheddar kosher burrito, and the creator of the more recent bulgogi and kimchee taco became the first food-truck operator to win Food & Wine’s annual New Chef award. And here in Texas we have the much-loved, much-decried Tex-Mex.

Arellano’s signature humor — he defines a group of mobile food vendors sharing a parking lot as a clustertruck — is at its best when discussing the self-appointed guardians of “authentic” Mexican food, such as Diane Kennedy of England and Oklahoma-born Rick Bayless. Granted, these folks have done much to record and preserve the core history of interior Mexican cooking, the parent of Mexican-American food; but they also turn their noses up at any meal served with chips and salsa as “unauthentic.” As counterpoint, Arellano trots out Houston cookbook author and El Real restaurant co-owner Robb Walsh for a fine rant on the virtues of authentic peasant grub and the social racism of knee-jerk distaste for the product of mixed cultures.

Arellano takes some good-hearted pokes at Tex-Mex, as is required for Californians, but Tex-Mex, Cal-Mex, New-Mex (which had its upscale decade in the limelight as New Southwestern), West-Mex and Colo-Mex and a host of others past, present, and future are branches of the same flourishing eternal chile bush.

Presidents, both Democrat and Republican, serve Mexican food to visiting heads of state, and woe unto the astronaut who arrives at the space station without a fresh supply of tortillas. It’s all Mexican food, and it’s as American as any of us.